Last summer’s Hurricane Katrina disaster also reinforced the idea of a country divided, leaving television viewers gasping at the sight of a black underclass without the wherewithal to escape, trapped in a drowning city that government forgot.

The compelling core class-and-race issue in the Duke situation is summed up by MSNBC’s Rita Cosby, whose prime-time program has covered the story extensively.

“You’ve got this African-American woman who comes from this poor [background], and you’ve got affluent white young men and the contrast between the two,” she tells the Phoenix. “In many ways, this story is a little bit of David and Goliath.”

Nowhere was the dichotomy clearer than in a pair of April 18 stories from Duke’s hometown paper, the Herald-Sun of Durham, North Carolina. One described the shock of Duke classmates after learning of the arrests of Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann, two “products of well-heeled families in toney New York City suburbs and exclusive prep schools.” The second story described the relief that the city’s “community leaders and NAACP activists” felt upon hearing of the arrests. One local minister expressed his belief that black suspects would have been arrested sooner than the white lacrosse players were.

A day later, more salt was poured on the cultural wounds. One of the suspects’ friends went on CNN to declare — with no apparent sign of humility — that Duke is “the number-five school in the country. We’re on a par with all the elite Ivy League universities. Every one of my peers is an awesome person, fantastic person, and has a lot of great attributes.”

On the same day, Reverend Jesse Jackson, whose participation in a controversy often defines it as a racial crisis, gave a Court TV Morning Radio interview in which he vowed to raise money for the accuser’s tuition. “Unfortunately, a growing number of young women around the country ... are exotic dancers ... stripping at night and paying tuition by day,” Jackson asserted.

In a plot twist sure to inflame passions, some commentators have mentioned the accuser in the same breath as Tawana Brawley, the African-American teen who triggered a media frenzy and racial showdown with her 1987 allegation — later thrown out by a grand jury — that she was raped by white law-enforcement officials.

The ‘no mas’ media defenseThe media blitz in the Duke rape saga — which includes widely seen photos of the accuser at the party where the crime was alleged to have occurred — should conjure up memories of the Kobe Bryant case. In 2003, a young white woman accused the African-American basketball star of rape, but the power and class advantages belonged to the celebrity jock.

Bryant’s accuser found herself the subject of death threats; her name was circulated on the Internet; sexy photos of her showed up in a supermarket tabloid attached to headlines such as DID SHE REALLY SAY NO?; and she was the target of an aggressive defense intent on exposing her sexual history. Shaken by all that scrutiny, the woman ultimately opted not to pursue the criminal case against Bryant.

Prodding the free market Yes Man Mike Bonanno on the most fun aspect of co-directing the new documentary, The Yes Men Fix the World: “climbing into an abandoned flooded quarry in a business suit with 30 pounds of rocks in the pockets to combat buoyancy for the underwater scenes.”

Department of conjecture The Haiti disaster will not serve to turn a state from toss-up to safely Republican as the George W. Bush Administration's calculated response to Hurricane Katrina did in Louisiana.

Easy does it Writer/producer Eric Overmyer was quoted in a New York Times Magazine article last month, but it’s worth repeating: “ Treme is not the The Wire .” He went on: “Those who are expecting The Wire or wanting The Wire may be frustrated.”

Local heroes 2010 In the 13th annual edition of the Providence Phoenix’s Best issue, we highlight people and organizations who are doing exceptionally good work.

Two sides to Guy I’m a delegate at the state Democratic convention and I didn’t vote for Guy Glodis for auditor.

On street level It is impossible not to wonder how Louisiana might have fared after Hurricane Katrina, had Barack Obama been in office a term sooner. There are so many questions about what went wrong and how it could have been handled differently, which have gone unanswered for more than three years.

Review: Mine Early in Geralyn Pezanoski's documentary, a news clip shows George Bush proclaiming, "The world saw this tidal wave of disaster descend upon the Gulf Coast, and now they're gonna see a tidal wave of compassion."

Down in the flood A few years ago, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (motto: Cornsistently Rong Abowt Everyting) informed me I was buying a house in a flood zone. FEMA had a map that showed where the waters of the semi-mighty Carrabassett River had surged over its banks a decade or so earlier and inundated my property.

Looking back to climb forward It's been four years since Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. Its causes and ramifications, though, extend much farther into both the past and the future. So say Alixa Garcia and Naima Penniman, Brooklyn-based spoken-word and multimedia artists known together as Climbing Poetree.

In a case as culturally loaded as this one, language is crucial in cementing public perceptions about the veracity and character of the accuser. Court TV anchor Catherine Crier says that one of the things that makes the “race” and “class” issues in this story so prominent is the question dogging the alleged victim: “Is she a wanton woman?”

Weighing in from his side of the class divide, Rush Limbaugh told his dittoheads that the Duke athletes were accused of raping some “hos.” (He later called that terminology a “terrible slip of the tongue.”)

ARTICLES BY MARK JURKOWITZ

HIT MEN | October 02, 2008 At least one passage in Four Kings will get George Kimball cursed out in local bars.

STILL CROONING | August 27, 2008 It’s the morning of Ted Kennedy’s 74th birthday, and as the senator enters NECN’s Newton headquarters, he warmly greets Chet Curtis — who is tan and rested after a stint in his Fort Lauderdale condo — as an old friend.